Historical maps with coloured areas denoting different land cover or use are a valuable record, but difficult to analyse. This R package automates much of the time-consuming and tedious process of turning paper maps into classified categorical raster maps.

A map is scanned, imported into R, and the software is trained by clicking in different areas of each category. It then automatically classifies pixels based on which colour they are most similar to. The resulting classification is assessed manually. The process can be repeated with slightly different parameters until a good fit is achieved.

The authors found 80-90% agreement between HistMapR classification and manual digitisation (sources of error included clarity of original maps and scan quality). Using HistMapR reduced the time needed for digitising a series of historical land cover maps from two months to two days. Ecologists interested in long-term dynamics should be cheering!

The HistMapR package is available on GitHub and you can find example scripts on Figshare, so you can get right to work.